I posted this question in the broadband forum but I thought a more targeted approach might be more effective.

I am on the 2Mbs/2Mbs (hopefully to be upgraded to 4Mbs/2Mbs) plan. Running the speedtest that is being discussed in the Broadband forum shows speeds of about 230kB/sec each way. However I have yet to achieve anything like those upload speeds in real world tests. Admittedly not exhaustive testing, but when I upload a US web site using ftp and/or setup a ftp server on my local machine and ask somebody in the US to try downloading from me. I get at best 40kB/sec. Just wondering what other folks are getting and what the problem might be.

The 4Mbps/2Mbps is between you and TCL, and generally any sites in NZ are pretty fast. The further away, the more routers to get to, the more hops from your connection to the destination server will have more hops. So generally you may not get to download or upload at fullspeed, due to these latency.

The 2Mbps upstream is also very much a "best effort". Unlike older plans where the 256kbps/512kbps were essentially guaranteed 24/7 speeds you'll find your speed may vary significantly at times.

I'm finding some short significant drops in connection speeds during the evening which is causing lots of problems with my VoIP phone. Trying speed tests while the phone is experiencing crappy audio is resulting in downstream speeds down to 200kbps or so for periods of 2-3 minutes. I've had this happen a few times in the evenings but pretty much get around 1900kbps both upstream and downsteam offpeak.

Cable is quite capable of better than the advertised 10mbps/2mbps down/upstream. But the real issue becomes backhaul and local loading - the more customers you put on the network, the less bandwidth everyone gets.

TelstraClear is doing a great job sweating the cable assets, to the point where the linespeeds above become quite difficult to achieve because the network is busy doing other things, because there are more customers on the service.

Quite a few people took Telecom to task over DSL, with it's minimum speed allocation of just 24kbps. I wonder what the minimum allocation is for TCL on the cable network, given it's a consumer grade best efforts service?

I'm on the PDQ service, and my 3.5mbps service is just 500kbps in the evening, and 68kbps upstream. Busy networks, huh!

I included a speed test with a US speed site to show the difference between the speedtest and real world ftp I get. I am not expecting to get 230KBs to the US as the local speedtest shows, but something hopefully better than 30KBs. I ran the speedtest US a few times and averaged at least 120Kbs upload speeds so that is why I am wondering

I get good download speeds using the download manager called Free Download Manager. As the name suggests, it only does downloads, not uploads. It integrates into Firefox with the help of the Flashgot extension and can open up several "sections" of a file that you're downloading, so gets around any artificial constraint placed by the FTP/HTTP site. Although usually there is a limit to the number of sections you can create - usually 4.

FileZilla is a good FTP program, but I don't think it does multithreaded uploads as chiefie recommends.

Chiefie - what program do you recommend to get multithreaded ftp uploads?

No - the issue is my upload speed, not download speed. I have divided up my files into several parts and asked my US friend to try running a number of concurrent downloads to see what speed he gets on each one. Maybe 3 at 40KBs and I get 120KBs!

I generally get near exactly 2MB upload speeds both in real world usage and www.NZDSL.co.nz on my 10/2MB plan, (and about 9MB real world download, however NZDSL doesnt do well measuring over 4MB down or up).

Last month on the same day as a network upgrade here in CHCH, my upload speed jumped to about 8MB(always over 4MB) on NZDSL every time and i have a picky. So I tested with a Torrent off a crap leech public site and got it to nearly 700KB/s. Unfortunately after the roll over period a few days ago my upload speed is back to nearly exactly 2MB. Does however prove to me they are capable of upping the "up" speed far higher than the current plans.

BTW I have notice sites like http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ do a piss poor job of benchmarking our international cable speeds if that is what a few of you are using to test international speeds.

No - the issue is my upload speed, not download speed. I have divided up my files into several parts and asked my US friend to try running a number of concurrent downloads to see what speed he gets on each one. Maybe 3 at 40KBs and I get 120KBs!

Well conducted an interesting experiment today. Asked a friend in the US to ftp a couple of 250MB files from me. I am using the Serv-U client. He managed about 40Kbs with one ftp going. When he got a second one going, the second went upto 40Kbs also! So the limit appears to be somewhere else in the system. I checked all the FTP server settings and there are no limits on upload speeds. So it remains a mystery that one session maxes out at 40Kbs but start another session and you get another 40Kbs.

Strange... I should try to get a local TCL person to ftp from me to remove the international side of the network

I'm on the 2Mbps/2Mbps TCL cable plan and I get about 80kBps (0.64 Mbps) when uploading files to Europe using FTP. I know the server in Europe is on a kick-ass internet connection and has no known speed restrictions placed on the FTP server (just plain old IIS running on Windows 2003 Server).

To an FTP server in NZ, I get more like 100-110 kBps (0.8 Mbps). I'm not sure exactly what sort of internet connection they have there.

I got a bit curious as I do a fair amount of uploading, so I did an experiment. I remote desktoped onto the server in Europe and pointed it at the web-server on my local machine. I got a paltry 20kBps! I'm running Win XP with IIS locally, but I couldn't see any restrictions on bandwidth in there. I was using a multi-connection download manager on the server in Europe (Free Download Manager) and it seemed to be only able to open one connection (usually it can open four). So, I thought maybe the OS is the problem. So I started up a "Windows 2003 Server" virtual PC locally, kicked off IIS on that, remoted desktoped to the server in Europe and repeated the experiment. Hey presto - 180kBps (1.44Mbps) and the download manager could open four connections. Pretty good for an international upload, especially as it was going through a router, encrypted Wi-Fi and a virtual network connection at my end.

So I do believe that you can get really quick international upload speeds through TCL - it just might be a bit difficult.

Now I don't what kind of OS you use, but I'd recommend based on this that you look at using a server OS (if you're not already) and setting up a web or ftp server (one that supports multiple connections) on your own PC and get the folks in the US to download using a multi-connnection download manager. If you need to be the one to initiate the upload, you could go through a remote administration tool like I did.